Adulterated food

What is food adulteration?

Natural ingredients used to make curry powder

  What is food adulteration?

 If food or drink is adulterated, someone has made its quality worse by adding water or cheaper things similar to it.

There are many food items in our markets, especially in village boutiques which are adulterated. 

Some food items are very expensive and cannot be found easily. So to increase the quantity of those foods and to get more profit manufacturers or sellers add some cheaper things. Now we can make a list of food items that can be easily adulterated by adding cheaper things.

Natural food item	Added cheaper things	Effect of the adulteration
Chili powder  Turmeric powder, Curry powder	Wheat flour	will not give the expected quality, required to add more to get the necessary taste
Kurakkan, Ulundu,	Wheat flour	will not give the expected taste, Sometimes, forced to eat unhealthy food
Bee’s honey, Kitul treacle, Jaggery	Cane sugar	decrease the natural flavour, lower the expected value when use as a medicine
Coconut oil	Palm oil	Will not give the expected quality and tasty when frying
Ghee	Coconut oil, yellow dye	Change the taste, odour and quality

 

                Table 2 Some food items which can be adulterated

How can we identify adulterated food?

 Before buying food items, we should observe a sample of them. For most of the food items, we can smell, taste, and can have a close look at them. Smelling is the best way of identifying the real natural quality of a food item. Some food items such as tea leaves, treacle, bees honey, gee have a special characteristic smell. When this foodstuff is adulterated that natural smell will not be there. Adulteration will destroy the identity; lower the value or effectiveness of the food. For example, when we eat curd with real kitul (Caryota urens) treacle it is tastier than the curd with adulterated treacle. On the other hand, if we buy kurahan flour adulterated with wheat flour we are eating wheat flour (sometimes which is advised not to be taken by diabetic patients) without being aware of it. When we had chili powder adulterated with wheat flour we have to add more to get the needed tasty. Then we do not get the real value of our money.

                         When we buy canned or packeted food we could not do any of the above observations, so it is better to depend on the emblem of SLS which is the emblem given by the Standard Bureau of Sri Lanka after analyzing the quality of the products. Prestigious trade names and previous experience also will help in choosing food items.

         Some sellers of bees’ honey put bees’ wax on top of the bottles of honey so; people could not taste or smell it to get aware of the quality. Adulterated foodstuffs like chili powder, turmeric powder, curry powder, etc. also come in packets. We could not find their quality as good or bad so the best thing is to prepare them at home.

            If we had bought chili, turmeric, or curry powder which is adulterated by wheat flour (starch) we can do a simple experiment to see the presence of starch. We can get a solution of the relevant food item and can add iodine solution (Iodine in potassium iodide) to it. The solution will become black-blue in colour if there is starch in the food.

  Sometimes sellers add brown dye to once-used tea leaves to give a dark colour to the drink. Sometimes they add yellow dye to the turmeric powder when they add flour to it.  The presence of the dye in tea leaves can be identified by adding a small amount of tea leaves into a glass of cold water. If the water in the glass where the tea leaves are added becomes brown in colour we can say that the tea leaves are mixed with a dye.

                  If we happened to buy coconut oil mixed with palm oil we can see in cold weather two layers in one bottle. One is the liquid layer (on top) and the other is the solid layer (bottom). If that oil had the same origin it would not show two layers. The same thing can see if we buy gee mixed with coconut oil.

                   In our country (Sri Lanka) packeted salt could not be sold without adding iodine. It is a rule given by the consumer protection act. If someone wants to sell packeted salt, iodine must be added to it. Iodine is an essential mineral that should be included in our diet to prevent goiters. Although it is compulsory to add iodine to packeted salt,   in some packets iodine cannot be found. Actually, this also can be considered as food adulteration. We can do a simple experiment to find whether the iodide salt contained iodine or not. To do this we can dissolve 1 teaspoon of salt in water in a glass and can add the starch solution to it. If iodine is there the solution will become black-blue in colour. The other thing is the cover of the packet. When it is a polythene cover the polythene should be not transparent because the sunlight that goes inside through the transparent cover will destroy iodine in the salt. 

                             If we buy a food item and find that it is adulterated or we know people who manufacture adulterated food we can complain about them to the following institutes.

• Consumer Protection Authority
• Sri-Lanka Standard Bureau
• Municipal Council of your area
• Public Health Inspector of your area

 These institutes will take action according to the rules and regulations of the consumer protection act.